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Applications of Alfred Tarski’s Ideas in Database Theory

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Book cover Computer Science Logic (CSL 2001)

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Abstract

Many ideas of Alfred Tarski - one of the founders of modern logic - find application in database theory. We survey some of them with no attempt at comprehensiveness. Topics discussed include the genericity of database queries; the relational algebra, the Tarskian definition of truth for the relational calculus, and cylindric algebras; relation algebras and computationally complete query languages; real polynomial constraint databases; and geometrical query languages.

I thank Janos Makowsky for having proposed me to write and present this paper. I owe a lot to Dirk Van Gucht, database theorist and Tarski fan, for having taught me so much during the past ten years, about database theory as well as about Tarski.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limburg (LUC), B-3590, Diepenbeek, Belgium

    Jan Van den Bussche

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  1. Jan Van den Bussche
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  1. LSV (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan and CNRS), 61, Avenue du Président Wilson, 94230, Cachan, France

    Laurent Fribourg

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Van den Bussche, J. (2001). Applications of Alfred Tarski’s Ideas in Database Theory. In: Fribourg, L. (eds) Computer Science Logic. CSL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2142. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44802-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44802-0_2

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